the archives

24 hours of Charm

Yesterday, I had lunch with a recently graduated social worker and friend-of-friend, featuring the best piece of berry pie I or you or anyone has ever eaten, at the Hon Cafe in Hampden. You will just have to come visit me and eat it. I can’t explain it. Whatever you have had before that has masqueraded as berry pie was not berry pie. THIS is berry pie.

She clarified something for me about social work that I have never understood. Once you are licensed and graduated and have all your supervision completed, you can be an independent contractor, just like a therapist can. Not all social workers are employees of the government.

It was a good conversation, but serious – we talked about neglect, parenting, about learning skills, about what social workers can reasonably do to help parents and kids and what they can’t do. She’s only been on the job a week.

I ran home for a few minutes and met my next-door neighbor, who is a city attorney who works on homicides. Really.

That was followed by drinks in Fells Point with two civil engineers working on harbor and freeway construction projects, over locally brewed beers, at the DuClaw Brewing Company, home of Venom.

I was pleasantly surprised by all the strong associations the engineers had with poetry: we ended up talking about Casey at the Bat, John Updike, Carl Sandburg. We also shared horror stories of the first-and-only times each of us has tried to write a poem for a boyfriend or girlfriend. That’s a mistake I think every teenager makes, but only once. You never do it again, or if you do, you expect to get laughed at.

Writing a poem about someone is quite different.

I ventured that more people have some kind of association with poetry, or with a particular poem, than with theater. They agreed.

Today, I’ve been up since 7 watering. Met a bunch of basketball players at Druid Hill Park while watering K’s okra. (I have to point out that the engineers had never heard of okra, and thought I was making the vegetable up.)

Continued on to my first Baltimore yoga class, at Charm City Yoga, the midtown branch. They offer a $20 unlimited class pass for a week for new students! And then I saw Single Carrot’s new show, SLAMPOONED, which takes off Chicago slam poetry, among other things. B and G of the Carrots (the Carrot?) are having dinner with me later. I met them in Poland, but we all live in Baltimore.